Context. Numerical simulations of stellar convection and photospheres have been developed to the point where detailed shapes of observed spectral lines can be explained. Stellar atmospheres are very complex, and very di erent physical regimes are present in the convection zone, photosphere, chromosphere, transition region and corona. To understand the details of the atmosphere it is necessary to simulate the whole atmosphere since the di erent layers interact strongly. These physical regimes are very diverse and it takes a highly e cient massively parallel numerical code to solve the associated equations. Aims. The design, implementation and validation of the massively parallel numerical code Bifrost for simulating stellar atmospheres from the convection zone to the corona. Methods. The code is subjected to a number of validation tests, among them the Sod shock tube test, the Orzag-Tang colliding shock test, boundary condition tests and tests of how the code treats magnetic field advection, chromospheric radiation, radiative transfer in an isothermal scattering atmosphere, hydrogen ionization and thermal conduction. Results. Bifrost completes the tests with good results and shows near linear e ciency scaling to thousands of computing cores.

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The stellar atmosphere simulation code Bifrost - Code description and validation

We have very recently re-determined the abundances of nearly all the available chemical elements in the solar photosphere, from lithium to thorium (Asplund et al. Annu. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 47, 481 (2009)). This new complete and homogeneous analysis results from a very careful selection of spectral lines of all the indicators of the abundances present in the solar photospheric spectrum, from a discussion of the atomic and molecular data, and from an analysis of these lines based on a new 3D model of the solar outer layers, taking non-LTE effects into account when possible. We present these new results, compare them with other recent solar data as well as with recent results for the solar neighborhood, and discuss some of their most important implications as well as some of the atomic data we still urgently need.

The chemical composition of the sun

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) small explorer mission will study how the solar atmosphere is energized. IRIS contains an imaging spectrograph that covers the Mg II h and k lines as well as a slit-jaw imager centered at Mg II k. Understanding the observations requires forward modeling of Mg II h and k line formation from three-dimensional (3D) radiation-magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD) models. This paper is the second in a series where we undertake this modeling. We compute the vertically emergent h and k intensity from a snapshot of a dynamic 3D RMHD model of the solar atmosphere, and investigate which diagnostic information about the atmosphere is contained in the synthetic line profiles. We find that the Doppler shift of the central line depression correlates strongly with the vertical velocity at optical depth unity, which is typically located less than 200 km below the transition region (TR). By combining the Doppler shifts of the h and k lines we can retrieve the sign of the velocity gradient just below the TR. The intensity in the central line depression is anti-correlated with the formation height, especially in subfields of a few square Mm. This intensity could thus be used to measure themore » spatial variation of the height of the TR. The intensity in the line-core emission peaks correlates with the temperature at its formation height, especially for strong emission peaks. The peaks can thus be exploited as a temperature diagnostic. The wavelength difference between the blue and red peaks provides a diagnostic of the velocity gradients in the upper chromosphere. The intensity ratio of the blue and red peaks correlates strongly with the average velocity in the upper chromosphere. We conclude that the Mg II h and k lines are excellent probes of the very upper chromosphere just below the TR, a height regime that is impossible to probe with other spectral lines. They also provide decent temperature and velocity diagnostics of the middle chromosphere.« less

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THE FORMATION OF IRIS DIAGNOSTICS. II. THE FORMATION OF THE Mg II h&k LINES IN THE SOLAR ATMOSPHERE

Aims. We present the Stagger-grid, a comprehensive grid of time-dependent, three-dimensional (3D), hydrodynamic model atmospheres for late-type stars with realistic treatment of radiative transfer, covering a wide range in stellar parameters. This grid of 3D models is intended for various applications besides studies of stellar convection and atmospheres per se, including stellar parameter determination, stellar spectroscopy and abundance analysis, asteroseismology, calibration of stellar evolution models, interferometry, and extrasolar planet search. In this introductory paper, we describe the methods we applied for the computation of the grid and discuss the general properties of the 3D models as well as of their temporal and spatial averages (here denoted ⟨3D⟩ models).Methods. All our models were generated with the Stagger-code, using realistic input physics for the equation of state (EOS) and for continuous and line opacities. Our ~ 220 grid models range in effective temperature, T eff , from 4000 to 7000  K in steps of 500  K, in surface gravity, log g , from 1.5 to 5.0 in steps of 0.5 dex, and metallicity, [Fe/H], from − 4.0 to + 0.5 in steps of 0.5 and 1.0  dex.Results. We find a tight scaling relation between the vertical velocity and the surface entropy jump, which itself correlates with the constant entropy value of the adiabatic convection zone. The range in intensity contrast is enhanced at lower metallicity. The granule size correlates closely with the pressure scale height sampled at the depth of maximum velocity. We compare the ⟨3D⟩ models with currently widely applied one-dimensional (1D) atmosphere models, as well as with theoretical 1D hydrostatic models generated with the same EOS and opacity tables as the 3D models, in order to isolate the effects of using self-consistent and hydrodynamic modeling of convection, rather than the classical mixing length theory approach. For the first time, we are able to quantify systematically over a broad range of stellar parameters the uncertainties of 1D models arising from the simplified treatment of physics, in particular convective energy transport. In agreement with previous findings, we find that the differences can be rather significant, especially for metal-poor stars.

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2013/09/aa21274-13.pdf

The Stagger-grid: A grid of 3D stellar atmosphere models - I. Methods and general properties

In this paper, we present an update to the open source MPI-AMRVAC simulation toolkit where we focus on solar and non-relativistic astrophysical magnetofluid dynamics. We highlight recent developments in terms of physics modules, such as hydrodynamics with dust coupling and the conservative implementation of Hall magnetohydrodynamics. A simple conservative high-order finite difference scheme that works in combination with all available physics modules is introduced and demonstrated with the example of monotonicity-preserving fifth-order reconstruction. Strong stability-preserving high-order Runge-Kutta time steppers are used to obtain stable evolutions in multi-dimensional applications, realizing up to fourth-order accuracy in space and time. With the new distinction between active and passive grid cells, MPI-AMRVAC is ideally suited to simulate evolutions where parts of the solution are controlled analytically or have a tendency to progress into or out of a stationary state. Typical test problems and representative applications are discussed with an outlook toward follow-up research. Finally, we discuss the parallel scaling of the code and demonstrate excellent weak scaling up to 30, 000 processors, allowing us to exploit modern peta-scale infrastructure.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0067-0049/214/1/4/pdf

MPI-AMRVAC for Solar and Astrophysics

We present the implementation of a radiative transfer solver with coherent scattering in the new BIFROST code for radiative magneto-hydrodynamical (MHD) simulations of stellar surface convection. The code is fully parallelized using MPI domain decomposition, which allows for large grid sizes and improved resolution of hydrodynamical structures. We apply the code to simulate the surface granulation in a solar-type star, ignoring magnetic fields, and investigate the importance of coherent scattering for the atmospheric structure. A scattering term is added to the radiative transfer equation, requiring an iterative computation of the radiation field. We use a short-characteristics-based Gauss-Seidel acceleration scheme to compute radiative flux divergences for the energy equation. The effects of coherent scattering are tested by comparing the temperature stratification of three 3D time-dependent hydrodynamical atmosphere models of a solar-type star: without scattering, with continuum scattering only, and with both continuum and line scattering. We show that continuum scattering does not have a significant impact on the photospheric temperature structure for a star like the Sun. Including scattering in line-blanketing, however, leads to a decrease of temperatures by about 350\,K below log tau < -4. The effect is opposite to that of 1D hydrostatic models in radiative equilibrium, where scattering reduces the cooling effect of strong LTE lines in the higher layers of the photosphere. Coherent line scattering also changes the temperature distribution in the high atmosphere, where we observe stronger fluctuations compared to a treatment of lines as true absorbers.

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V. H. Hansteen

Papers

Radiative transfer with scattering for domain-decomposed 3D MHD simulations of cool stellar atmospheres